In order to reliably assist humans in daily tasks in a wide range of real-world environments, robots should be able to effectively and deftly manipulate different types of objects. The development of new cost-effective robotic grippers or other hand-like artificial systems plays a key role in enabling robotic dexterous object manipulation.
Researchers at the Improbable AI Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently designed a new two-fingered robotic gripper designed to handle daily operational tasks more effectively.
Their proposed robotic system, which was introduced in a paper on the preprint server arXiv and will be included in the IEEE ICRA 2024 conference minutes, can successfully pick objects with different shapes and textures and then place them in designated locations.
“We provided robotic fingers with the mechanical and dynamic requirements to be able to perform 30 different daily tasks,” Rubén Castro Ornelas, Tomás Cantú and their colleagues wrote in the paper. “To meet these requirements, we have proposed a finger design based on series elastic actuation, which we call the daily finger. Our focus is to make the fingers as compact as possible while achieving the required performance.”
The robotic grip designed by the researchers consists of a structure with two robotic fingers protruding from it. The two fingers are similar in size and shape to human fingers, allowing them to bend and grip objects tightly.
The team’s humanoid fingers are designed to handle simple daily tasks, such as picking up objects and placing them in precisely defined locations, rather than the more complex and advanced manual tasks. Although the team initially created a Cangkou with 2 degrees of freedom (DoF) using only two robotic fingers, in the future they hope to create Cangkou with more fingers.
“Our fingers have only two degrees of freedom,” the researchers wrote. “With the third degree of freedom, the size of the palm increases. In future iterations, it will be difficult to fit five fingers on one hand, but a three-fingered or even four-fingered hand is still possible. To make a full five fingers, -fingers, we may have to wait for more torque-intensive actuators to emerge.”
To evaluate the performance of the two-finger holder, they tested it in a series of real-world experiments. These experiments evaluated the speed and compliance of the system, as well as the forces exerted on objects while completing three basic “pick and place” tasks.
Cantu’s Onellas wrote: “We evaluated daily fingers by building a two-fingered robot that tested various performance parameters and tasks, such as picking and placing dishes on shelves, picking up thin and flat objects such as paper, and delicate objects such as strawberries.
In real-world experiments, the researchers ‘two-finger gripper performed very well, successfully completing all three basic tasks they tested. Although these are very basic responsibilities, they reflect the activities that humans engage in every day.
Therefore, the promising results collected in preliminary testing highlight the promise of this Cangkou for developing basic domestic robots. In the future, researchers can further improve the design of Cangkou and evaluate its performance in a wider range of daily tasks.
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Original text:https://techxplore.com/news/2024-08-finger-robotic-tackles-everyday-tasks.html
More information: Rubén Castro Ornelas et al, Everyday Finger: A Robotic Finger that Meets the Needs of Everyday Interactive Manipulation, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2408.04142
More information: Rubén Castro Ornelas et al., Daily Fingers: Robot Fingers for Daily Interactive Operations, arXiv (2024). DOI：10.48550/arxiv.2408.04142
Journal information: arXiv
Journal information: arXiv
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